We give a sharp lower bound for the selfintersection of a nef li
ne bundle L on an irregular variety X in terms of its continuous global sections and the Albanese dim
ension of X, which we call the Generalized Clifford-Severi inequality. We also extend the result to nef
vector bundles and give a slope inequality for fibred irregular varieties. As a byproduct we obtain a lower b
ound for the volume of irregular varieties; when X is of maximal Albanese dimension the bound is vol(X)=2n!¿¿X
and it is sharp.